LOL. My friend who hooked me up with the tickets just sent the pre-show communication, which he claims he did not read beforehand, which says this for "attire" for the show: "Dress with a sense of the occasion. That being the afterlife, the undead. Immortal chic have you. You'll want to be dressed as good as the music will sound." WTF man. Did AI write that? And if I would have known, I could have gone full Dracula!
And then the show started - sort of - by a recording of crickets popping up in the darkness. After a while, some creaking was added into that (whether that was a hanging rope with a body at the end of footsteps, not sure). And finally, a tolling bell. No music or really lighting has happened, and we are like 3 minutes into the show. Finally, Josh Homme comes out from the audience, grabs one of those workshop lights where the back is shrouded in orange plastic and the bulb just blares light out the other side, and starts singing a cappella with that light thrust into his own face. After a few lines, the band started slowly making their way on stage and joining in to "Paper Machete," as Homme started wandering into the audience and meandering around the stage. It was very theatrical, very The Queens Take Broadway or that weird vampire puppet play from Forgetting Sarah Marshall. But I was honestly entranced. Sucked me right in to the campy theater of it all.
This will get you an idea of what it felt like - the solo start and then adding in other instrumentation:
Supposedly, at the time they were filming this, Homme was in dire need of treatment for cancer and was in bad pain, but they really wanted the opportunity to perform in these Paris catacombs so he gutted it out.
The set definitely leaned into the newer albums, and when they picked a track from an older album (that I knew better) it was usually one of the slower, introspective tunes that sounded great with the horn and string sections that showed up after the first few songs. Like, "Mosquito Song," the album closer from my fav, Songs for the Deaf, is already a semi-acoustic oddball with some orchestral flourishes, so it made good sense for that to be part of the set here in their goth vampire mode. But it meant we didn't get any of the hits.
And that was my main beef here, because I went into this experience with earplugs in hand, ready to have my face melted with the heavy riffage that attracted me to these dudes in the first place. And this show was very freaking cool - like nothing I have seen before! But the thought that I had this morning on my dog walk that it was like going to get your favorite burger, and then instead giving you the best turkey burger patty you've ever had. That turkey burger could be legitimately great, but when you were wanting your favorite cheeseburger, it will feel like a disappointment.
Oh, and one other quibble that most of what Homme said was dumb as shit. I was cringing either because it was dime-store ass philosophy garbage like "the fragility of the human soul is something I am considering now, and the methods we retain that soul despite the crushing despair of" blah blah blah. That was not actually one of his riffs, I wasn't writing them down, but they were all pretty brutal. And then some lady yelled out that she loved him, and he told her his room number and seemed genuinely to want her to come to his room to get it on. Like I said, weird.
But another bit of schtick that he was doing that was genuinely funny - he had a meat cleaver that he was carrying around, tossing in the air, and brandishing towards audience members from only inches away. He wandered the audience a bit, at one point sitting in a guy's lap and chugging part of his cocktail. Those bits made it pretty darned fun. And overall, even with the odd gothic re-framing of these songs, it was a really good show and a fun experience I am so glad to have had.
Probably too late to get in on it, but apparently they are doing the same show at Bass Concert Hall tonight. Get get amongst it.
